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- There was a good meeting at Bretton Woods last weekend, from the George Soros related Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET).
What I noticed as provocative was that the experts are slowly recognizing that what we're seeing are "new phenomena" that economies are simply not supposed to do, and not just "slide rule errors" of someone's miscalculation...
The take home message from one session was "We need better conceptual models for reading economic data".
http://synapse9.com/blog/2011/04/13/we-need-better-conceptual-models-for-reading-economic-data/
- Francis Fukuyama seems to do a good job of tracing the implications of modern social science theory back toward the origins of society, but doesn't seem to take advantage of "the physical world theory" in doing so. He sticks entirely with "the explanatory world" of man's attempts to construct images and explanations for nature in our minds.
If one thinks of “the physical world” as what people are trying to explain, as the subject of our explanations that would appear to work on its own, it would then NOT be using our explanations to do so. The world that uses our explanations to operate would be “the explanatory world” we make up.
What that’s useful for is things like finding a more satisfying answer for why people needed to see Gods as a “universal connector” to fill in pervasive gaps in out explanations that we were unable to fill. People mostly can't explain how nature connects all kinds of things. That makes it hard to do without and reasonable to hypothesize Gods to do that. They serve as the connectors of the things of nature we can't explain, which is quite a lot. As science finds out how to connect more things it also seems what is unknown and unknowable may be expanding too… is one of the interesting things.
In the evolution of science to date most of science has been trying to construct explanatory worlds, postulating that nature follows rules from a distance, leaving much to be explained. What’s now happening, though, is that theoretical biology and systems sciences are very slowly inching forward toward becoming able to identify natural mechanisms of organization (how nature connects things) to replace the idea of “rules at a distance” in nature.
One basic leaping off point is realizing that to study a physical world, that works by itself using internal processes instead of by following external rules, it must be a study of uncontrolled systems. That gives you a way to draw a line between our world of explanations and the natural world that works by itself, that our thinking so imperfectly explains.
I have a collection of work on the physics of open systems at www.synapse9.com, and two papers in Cosmos & History on some general aspects of how to observe and discuss natural processes of organization that work by themselves, Models Learning Change (1) & Life’s Hidden Resources for Learning(2).
1) http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/176/295
2) http://www.cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/102/203
- Thank you Danny! Your shows were a great gift, and an extended life for the first great age of recorded popular music. Rest well.
I appreciated Danny's shows more and more as I listened to his fresh recall of details from the whole fast dance of vibrant popular music cultures and styles that flowered, since 78's and radio made a national music market such a happening thing. I hope others follow suite, and find new ways to keep the many musics of the American experience alive.
I remember a show on The Takeaway, I think, that gave a nice example of another way to do it. It was of a reconstructed news broadcast, editing together the voices of a particular week in the past, that so nicely made it come alive. Maybe shows doing the same with music, presenting the music of various moments in the past presented as you would have heard them at the time. You might collect party music of a particular age, knit together with snippets of social chatter between numbers, as if you were at a party of the time, and things like that. I was even thinking it might even be a good way to archive Danny's vast collection, organized as a resource for studying moments in American life.
Glad you're playing a bunch of Danny's shows! Thanks so much.
- It's sad that not a single economist seems able to get a word in edgewise on this. What happened to the economists, anyway?? Aren't we supposed to have scientific views of the choices to help balance the spirited hysteria that politics always is??
What happened when we tried this "cut cut cut" urge when seeing ballooning deficits in the 1930's, resulted in every economics student now being told to see that as the false strategy for pulling out of the deep hole we were in at that time. So, that's not the fix now, either. Inaction is likely not the fix either, of course.
Clearly the problem has to do with the need to honor what turned out to be ballooning promises for unrealistic expectations for earnings. When reality ruins your business plan the only profitable way out of it, as various people have pointed out at other times too, is for the creditors to realize they also need a profitable way out, because they are just as threatened as the debtors. Nature's just not made of money, and getting rather cheap in handing out more and more resources too!
We're definitely at a defining moment for people learning how to invest in sustainability.
http://www.synapse9.com/pub/ASustInvestMoment.pdf.pdf
- I think the idea of freedom is complex, because all relationships in nature are, and natural language evolved in a way to be useful (if still imperfect) for discussing complex relationships.
One of the "imperfections" seems to be that nearly all people are surprised to find out that the world they see in their minds is not the same one everyone else in the world lives in... There seems to be a world we live in in common, but we do definitely refer to it through our own made up world of ideas, and each reinvent our own images of the world and its relationships. That definitely messes up the rules you can expect others to follow. So I think people who don't have an interest in that natural complication in life would generally miss a lot of what the word "freedom" means to people who are.
So, there seem to be both true and false expectations for how to live with each other, that there is a lot of natural confusion and need to be flexible about. So to me, "freedom" in a society like America means giving the benefit of the doubt as to what is right or wrong for another person, to that other person, unless you can be certain another view isn't just made up, and basically necessary to maintain the freedoms of individuals to convey.
- Gee whiz! Framing all relationships and communications in terms of "friend, foe or undecided" interprets life as nothing but a power struggle, without purposes. What's with that??
What about the vast majority of concerns where people are differently informed but all seeking common interests??? Are those just a footnote of some kind, as "future research" perhaps?
- There's a quite fascinating "statistical" connection between the explosive emergence of the "Hip-Hop tribe" and the 1990 collapse of "the great urban crimewave" of the 60's, 70's & 80's.
http://www.synapse9.com/cw/crimewave_nys2.htm
- It occurs to me that there's an easy way to define the change in policy.
Simply restrict the current policy to teachers last hired within the last 6 or 9 months (or something). Then leave it to discussion and agreement between the administrators, teachers union and the Mayor to agree how to cooperate, and find how to decide what relatively new teachers are held in high regard and need protection in the interests of the teaching community.
What would wreck it would be brinkmanship, people trying to push one and only one idea. If everyone is trying to serve the kids and preserve the professional culture of the schools it would be just a matter of how, as everyone would naturally be on the same side, really.
- what about the other way to avoid the continual compounding of debt?? Islam bans charging interest, as did the Catholics. Both cultures found ways around that. The other way is too only permit the retention of interest for more lending when the environment is productive enough to sustain it.
That's the only slightly tricky way Keynes suggested for removing the debt overhang. That's actually something that could be turned on and off like a faucet, for when it's really needed like today.
- “My take” is that you have a great program, but… I agree with James Parrot, your speaker, that the system would have been overwhelmed whatever the financial regulation had been in place, and I’ve been saying that would occur for 30 years.
It’s ever more clear that media speculation on the economy, and your own as part of it, is little more than idle gossip. For years the daily speculation has swung all over the place, always showing next to zero awareness of the economy’s accumulating real physical challenges.
Understanding my view is both simple and involved, as any ground breaking science is bound to be. I’m not the only one seeing the problem, though. You should open a discussion on whether our concept of “economic normality” is consistent with living in a natural world. It’s unequivocally not, violating the conservation of energy in myriad ways for one interesting problem.
Other scientists out here have a diversity of useful views on the problem too. We study the relation between economic systems and their environments. Learning how to consider economies as physical systems, as ecologies. That has been a while in developing, yes. The tragedy is that it has been so slow. Our physical circumstance has deteriorated considerably for our failing to understand what’s physically happening, while people have generally preferred their “myths”.
Honor the legacy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s, who urged us to not be bystanders in our own lives, saying : "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
#1 issue in sustainability how popular myths distract us from how we are making our conflicts with nature worse.
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